Wikipedia in the news

It's quite impressive that the Wikipedia, an online organisation that only employs a single full time employee, can make it onto the front page of the financial times.

Is this some kind of conspiracy by offline print moguls trying to defend themselves against the new form of publishing that the Wikipedia embodies?

There was not as much prominence given to this article: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5997332.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn

Ah well. Hope the Wikipedia keeps on going, and that it sorts itself out and gets some advertising on there! 

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - U.S. 'unaware of Iraq war doubts'

Ummm...

Fossils and Geology of Hopes Nose, Torquay. Fossil Collecting & Geological Guides

Looks worth a visit!

Murder Mystery Evening

Awesome night - doing a bit of acting and roleplay, pretending to be a judge. Didn't manage to guess the killer correctly, though it was a bit of a cheat, the killers name was Scarlet Kipper. I assumed that as she was called Scarlet Kipper, that she was a red herring...
Unfortunately, she wasn't!! 

Old Picture

Just found this photo, reminding me of old times... 

Strange Dream

Very very unusual for me to remember a dream, but this one was so much fun I did for once...

Dreamt that I was very late for work \ some kind of meeting. Decided to take a short cut by trying to run down a mountain to a little coast path that lead to where I was going (this made perfect sense at the time). The path got steeper and steeper until I was just sliding down. At one point I thought it might end in a sheer cliff, but I didn't mind too much.
Of course, it did end up at a sheer drop and I was left hanging on to a ledge (just like in films). Then, luckily, someone from my agency and Colm turned up to give me a hand up. Unfortunately the person from agency over-reached and fell off the cliff. I remember not caring that they fell to their death, but I honestly can't remember which person from my agency it was...
Then Dan appeared and together Colm and Dan helped me up and took me to a car where they drove me to my appointment, which was when I woke up.

Talk about a dream teaching morals - don't rely on the people from work, trust your friends instead?!

Public Enemy

Saw Public Enemy last night.
They weren't as good as I'd hoped they would be. It wasn't as Old Skool as I expected - there were people with guitars there and they had live drums rather than a good old drum machine. I admit that they were good at hyping up the crowd and managed to show their fans a good time.
You do have to think that there does come a point where it's time to stop! Twenty years in the business seems a little excessive - especially when you start to sound like the fun loving criminals... 

Paranoia

I'm not usually in the habit of taking photos of people on buses, but this woman was different.
There's currently lots int he news about this avian flu business, however I still haven't seen proof that it has made the leap from infecting birds to infecting humans. This person seems to think differently!
I wasn't living in London at the time of SARS, but that seemed to be another media fuelled scare story. By coincidence, I was reading an amusing story in the Guardian. It was making an extremely valid and relevant point about the BSE scares of the early and mid 1990s. There were predictions of seeing millions of people die from a disease that could cross the boundaries between Human physiology and Cow physiology.
So far, at least, this hasn't proven to be the case. When was the last time you heard of a new case of CJD being diagnosed?
I remember stories focusing on kids who used to eat beef every single day catching this horrific disease.
Mobile phones causing cancer is another of those scare stories, that is just beginning to fade. MMR vaccines is one of the few scare stories that actually got proven wrong during the 'scare cycle.'
The only real solution to this kind of nonsense is some kind of mandatory comparison of risks people have to take, some kind of benchmark risk. How about the likelihood of being run over for someone who lives in London and crosses the road twice each day.
It would be scary in itself to see the number of scare stories that don't succeed in being more deadly than that (I cross the road at least 10 times a day in my commute to work...) 

Pocket-lint.co.uk AOL to launch online TV service news story

Wasn't this the entire point of AOL mergin with Time Warner about five years ago?

All the papers are just reporting this as some kind of innovation for AOL. SUrely the quesiton should be what took them so long?

For the companies in question, it's the only way they're going to be able to make any significant money out of their old shows. THe fact that one of the 'channels' is going to be dedicated to shows that feature stars before they became famous is an indication of the quality of the programming.

At least it will be going ahead. I hope the BBC's service comes online soon and shows all these monkeys how it should be done!

Google Print and Copyright

Slightly crazy position for the authors to take - I don't fully understand the position they are taking.

From my experience, having seen one or two results popping up from Google Print, Google doesn't allow you to read the whole book. In fact, it doesn't allow you to read more than three or four pages.

What's the point of going off like this? I strongly suspect Google will \ already has put in links to Amazon or eBay so that you can buy a book immediately after reading the pages.

Once eBooks come of age (which is growing more and more likely with the rise of PSPs, better screens on mobiles and Video iPods) we would be able to buy the book immediately and receive it immediately.

If any author supports the idea of their work appearing in a public library I see no need to object to their work appearing in this. The fact that almost any book can be read for free merely by paying a visit to any of the 4,624 libraries in the UK yet book buying still remains popular is a strong indicator that demand for reading material is unlikely to be dampened by Google.

Go Google!

Fantastic Weekend!

After a particularly hectic week at work, I managed to get some good quality time off.

Friday night I went to see Nick play at the End. None of the sets were amazingly outstanding, but it was a really good night. Nick played a brilliant set, he looks much more comfortable with having three hundred people looking on as he does his thing.

There were a good bunch of people there, I'm beginning to get used to this whole London scene. I spent last night with the London lot too. Went to see fireworks at Alexandra palace, which were pretty good though they were synced to music. More specifically to the beach boys and other gems selected by Capital FM. Ah well!
There was an extremely good turnout, though this disturbed Laura as she thought it wasn't managed very well - probably a fair point. I didn't manage to meet up with Colm et al until well after the fireworks had finished.

The rest of the night was spent drinking in the pub having fun. Today was spent not doing much, just watching TV, reading the papers and such like. It's always good to get a good bit of relaxation every now and then. 

Pumpkin

Geeky I know but there we go! 

Dinner at Lincoln's Inn

Jo kindly invited me to dinner at Lincoln's Inn.
Lovely food and lovely wine, followed by Port is always appreciated.
I was a bit suprised to find that all the people I talked to seemed to have been in Cambridge at around the same time I had been there. One of the people I met there seemed to look very very familiar.
Ah well, it was good fun meeting them all and I look forward to having more political discussions with random barristers.
Slightly stressful getting there on time. Spent the majority of the afternoon frantically trying to get a campaign live. My AD took ages approving the insertion order - so lots of running round before I finally got things done.
Internal processes are good in some ways, but not when they get in the way of efficient working. 

Trip up BT Tower!

Went for a seminar run by the IPA - something about 'advertising after the TV spot.' Reasonably interesting seeing someone talking about the new trends in technology. Particularly interesting was a talk from Helen something or other - head of Thomas Cook TV. I think they've done good work in promoting their brand.

More interesting, however, was the lunch at the top BT Tower. 34 floors up in the centre of London is always a good thing! Spent a little time mingling, but soon tired of networking. Maybe that's a skill I need to practice a bit more.

Annoyingly, I didn't get the chance to go to the Ad.com party - was hoping to be able to leave the office on time, but didn't.

However, I did manage to meet up with Alex Petrovic who was visiting from Geneva. It was good to hear he was doing well.

To make the day even better, I had my annual review and was given a pay rise (though not as much as I would have liked!) 

Fast Forward

Well - we didn't win. Annoyingly, Sting managed to win even though he didn't put that much time into his group's presentation.
Taking Campaign down the heat magazine model didn't sound like a sensible idea to me, but it's not my decision.
We went drinking after finding out that we'd lost. This is Katherine, a girl in my team taking a draw from a Shisha pipe.

Good fun was had by all! 

Big Picture | Google invites 400 to 'off the record' event | CNET News.com

Big Picture | Google invites 400 to 'off the record' event | CNET News.com

Awesome - more of these!


I want to see one of these done on the Guardian. Or Google News

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Why calls for a boycott of Brazilian beef are misplaced

Good points!


hehe - Bustani

Blog: 17 March 04. Bill Hicks

This piece is a bit close to home.

Working in adland does change some of your perceptions. When I clicked on the button to post this to the blog, I noticed that urchin are tracking the activities on Blogger.

Strange thing to notice, but then they are one of the web trackers we use at work to monitor usage. Had a good argument \ debate with Colm the other day about it. There are many parts of my job that are dark \ evil but the fact that technology allows it just makes me think it is cool!

It's all about the triumph of technology. I can use a sophisticated tracking system at work to target people who have bought a car recently and then advertise car insurance at them. Does this mean it is something bad?

Ah well - Sunday evening thoughts indeed!

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | George Monbiot: The price of cheap beef ...

Seems to have a strange definition of slavery - by this measure all workers during the industrial revolution would have been slaves?

Courtney Looking Crafty

Sometimes (rarely) my phone actually takes a good picture!